Note: If you had not heard, a petition to the White House exists that asks for the federal government to peacefully allow Texas to secede from the Union. Well over 100,000 individuals have added their names. There aren’t many words for such an extraordinarily embarrassing endeavor, but State Representative Garnet Coleman came up with some. Below is a note from this Wednesday…
Leakey, Texas is home to a malicious church named Church in the Valley. Look at their sign earlier this week:
Update, 10:00 a.m. Thursday: the homeowner has added an American flag to his display. Click here for more.
Today, Burnt Orange Report received the photo at right, taken in front of a home in Northwest Austin. The resident, a Republican, lynched an empty chair from a tree in his yard, which one can easily interpret to represent a racially motivated act of violence against the President.
According to recently released census data, Texas has the highest uninsured rates in the country, with a full 26.3 percent of Texas residents lacking health insurance coverage. Massachusetts, home to the health laws that most closely resemble the Affordable Care Act, has the lowest rate, with only five percent lacking insurance.
Back in Charlotte, KVUE caught up with BOR’s own Joe Deshotel about the convention, our party, and our President. Take a look!
As Ted Cruz prepares to address the Republican National Convention in Tampa tonight, Texas Latino PAC ‘One Texas’ has a strong video message for Ted Cruz. From Texas Latinos. The real ones, not the hypothetical ones that the mainstream media will talk about tonight being in awe of Ted Cruz.
Now that SCOTUS has ruled that the Affordable Care Act is mostly here to stay, Republican state leaders, with Rick Perry at the forefront, are doing everything they can to avoid implementation.
Despite the 4.5 million Texans insured through Medicaid who otherwise would not be able to afford coverage, Perry recently stated that adding people to Medicaid is like “adding people to the Titanic.” Accordingly, he’s limiting Medicaid expansion in Texas - an expansion that would have been required as part of the ACA, but is now optional. And the price paid for all the posturing is that a lot of people who could stand to benefit tremendously from the ACA now won’t. Politico reports: “Perry’s decision means as many as 1.3 million people who could have gained coverage under the Medicaid expansion won’t get it, according to figures from the Urban Institute. That’s more than any other state that has given a definite ‘no’ to the Medicaid expansion, including Florida.”
The chart below, courtesy of the Washington Post, shows that Texas has some of the most to gain from the ACA. Currently only families under about 30 percent of the federal poverty line are covered by Medicaid - a fact that will fortunately remain unchanged despite Perry’s feelings about Medicaid. It’s also fortunate that families between 100 and 133 percent of the poverty line will now be eligible for subsidies to buy a private plan, again regardless of Perry. But families between 22 percent and 100 percent of the poverty line in Texas - families who were supposed to receive Medicaid - will receive neither Medicaid nor subsidies to help them purchase insurance. Because they were supposed to receive Medicaid, the subsidies were never allocated for them.
Worth sharing: DailyKos user dreaminonempty aggregated the Texas results of a national PPP survey on Obama vs Romney, and found that Texas respondents were tied:
Over the period of April 12 - July 1, 662 respondents to the Daily Kos/SEIU/PPP State of the Nation poll were reached at a Texas phone number. Among these respondents, Obama and Romney were tied 47-47. (Please note that this is an aggregation of interviews from the weekly poll, not a stand-alone poll.)The two stand-alone polls from the same time period also show a relatively tight margin among registered voters. Texas is a Tossup at least by New York Times standards, based on this result and the two other polls with Romney +7 and Romney +8, for an average of Romney +5.
The post goes on to state that while this is a poll of registered, not likely voters, and that we saw similar trends in 2008, our state isn’t too likely to go Blue this cycle, but we’ve got strong potential.
Granted, Texas is an expensive state to campaign in given our sheer size, population, and number of costly media markets. But we’ve got great potential. One of the most pressing needs for Democrats here in Texas is to register and turn out our substantial Latino and African-American populations. Newly elected TDP Chairman Gilberto Hinojosa has shown a strong commitment to base mobilization, and these poll numbers should just reinforce the need to turn Texas into a competitive battleground, and eventually flip the state into the Blue column.
After all, when Texas goes Democratic again, it will be nearly impossible for the Republican party to elect a President ever again. That alone is a good reason to fight this fight, as far as I’m concerned.
What do you think? Will the Obama-Romney margin in Texas be narrower than 10 points?
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